President Obama bypassed congressional approval and signed 23 executive actions on January 16 towards curbing gun violence. Among them was a memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to research gun violence. That move was despite threats from NRA-backed members of Congress to de-fund any such future studies. In fact, two days prior to the President’s announcement (and the one month anniversary of the Newtown, massacre,) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a scathing report on how the gun lobby blocked federal funding for the gun violence research, noting that the CDC’s budget on firearm injury prevention decreased 96 percent in the past two decades, and the Justice Department funded no studies in the past four years.
But what do we already know about guns and violence?
The latest in a flurry of studies on violent behavior released over the past few months also came just two days prior to the President’s announcement.
According to results released January 14 in a national poll of more than 4,000 high school and college students taken before the Newtown shootings, more young folks planned on owning a gun than had them in their childhood homes. The poll, conducted by American University and GfK Research, found that while only one-third of young people grew up with a gun at home, nearly 40 percent plan to own a gun and an additional 20 percent are considering it. Of these kids, roughly 50 percent who self-identify as “depressed,” “stressed out,” and/or have “difficulty making friends” plan to own a gun.
There was also a gaping gender, race, and political affiliation gap:
Girls (40 percent) were more likely than boys (32 percent) to fear gun violence and less likely to report a plan to own a gun.
Half of the black respondents fear gun violence, compared to 31 percent of white respondents, but blacks are less likely than whites to report planning to own a gun.
Democrats at 45 percent are nearly twice as likely to fear gun violence in contrast to Republicans at 25 percent, and less likely to own a gun in the future.
This new interest in guns among young people is important in light of an earlier study that found teens who fight might be modeling what they see their adult relatives with pro-fighting attitudes do. According to a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center April 2012 study, there may also be “differences between boys and girls, and racial/ethnic groups in risk and protective factors for fighting."
The researchers conducted focus groups with 65 middle and high school students to discuss why they fight. The groups, divided by race/ethnicity as well as whether students were fighters, or non-fighters indicated that adolescent fighting affects 40 percent of African Americans, 36 percent of Latinos, and 30 percent of whites. Reasons to fight were to defend themselves or others, maintain respect, respond to verbal insults, or from anger due to “other stressors.” The girls also cited “gossip or jealousy.”
But the big racial/ethnic difference researchers found was within family attitudes: Many Latino students noted that their parents condoned fighting only when physically attacked and said not wanting to “embarrass” their parents might prevent them from fighting.
With the presidential lifting of the “ban” on federal gun violence studies, it will be interesting to see what future results reveal about these racial/ethnic differences in violence when factoring guns into the picture.